“Let yez come soon, rosydandry falconyera or lowther (Loderi) is an admiration”This was obeyed and proved true! The gardens at this stage started to decline as the area could not be well maintained by only one person.
[I here insert an extract from the www.wicklow.ie website, which gives extra details of Kilmacurragh as a hotel - D.P.David O'Donoghue,* Sunday Business Post 29 April 2001After the deaths of the brothers Charles Annesley Acton and Reginald Acton, in World War One, the house fell into disrepair. The house lay vacant until it was rented to a German called Charles Budina, who ran the place as a hotel and had a ballroom built in the garden behind the house. This proved to be a very successful venture and for twenty years "Kilmacurra Park Hotel" offered all amenities with the finest continental cuisine at such a reasonable terms as:by Eileen Byrne, typos corrected. Note the alternative spelling of Kilmacurragh.]All food stuff was grown (and manufactured) on the estate."The manufacturing of meat", a brochure for the hotel, boasted "into 100 different table delicacies was carried out for the first time in Ireland at Kilmacurra Park Hotel". During the war years the hotel guests arrived at Glenealy Railway Station and were collected from there in a pony and trap by Michael O'Connor. Because it had such a healthy environment doctors frequently recommended a stay at Kilmacurra, as a tonic, to their patients. Indeed many prominent men in the Dublin medical profession were frequent visitors. A brochure promoting the hotel invited visitors to "bring your children, leave them at Kilmacurra Park Hotel for their annual holidays; they would be safely looked after, and will enjoy a perfectly healthy holiday amidst natural surroundings, and will be fed on the fat of the land, the purest and most wholesome food".
- 3 guineas per week B+B
- 25/- week end Lunch
- 2/6 Tea with meat delicacies 2/-
For over twenty years, Kilmacurra Park Hotel was one of the best known hotels in the country,and many of the local grannies and grandads have some wonderful memories of the good old days when romance first begun to blossom for them to strains of the music of "The Shamrocks Céilí Band" from Arklow or the "Cill Mhantain Round Tower". However at the start of World War Two Charles Budina went back to his native Germany. On his return to Kilmacurra in 1950 a dispute arose about the ownership of the hotel and shortly afterwards it closed down. For a short period, in 1956 it opened as an Irish Summer School.
“In one of Eamon De Valera's cannier wartime moves, he persuaded the British to grant 50 Germans safe passage through what was technically enemy territory. They gathered at the mailboat at Dun Laoghaire on September 11, 1939 amid Nazi salutes and shouts of "Auf Wiedersehen" Charles Budina was among this group.”